Not Senior Night with capital letters, which isn’t a busy affair for the Wildcats in most years. It was a lower-case event that was a big deal for the Florida Gators, who put a serious grip on the Southeastern Conference regular season title and a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed with a 69-59 victory over the No. 14 Wildcats.

Scottie Wilbekin (AP Photo)

Florida’s veteran core of point guard Scottie Wilbekin, center Patric Young, power forward Will Yeguete and small forward Casey Prather had never earned a victory at Rupp Arena. Now they have one.

When it was over, center Patric Young told reporters, he had one thought: "Did we really just win here?"

Perhaps he'll have the same thought should these Gators seniors again wind up in an NCAA Tournament regional final: most likely the South, which will be contested in Memphis. They haven’t been to the Final Four, either, but this team looked like one that has serious potential to play past the Elite Eight hurdle that has caught them in each of the past three seasons.

The Gators seniors scored 58 of their team’s 69 points, with Wilbekin delivering 23 and Prather 24 in helping the team improve its record to 23-2, 12-0. They are in prime position to finish the SEC regular season with a perfect record, which UK's 2012 squad was the last to achieve—and we all know how that turned out.

"I think we have a lot of guys that believe in each other," Yeguete said afterward. "I think we believe that we can make plays down the stretch and we just try to stay in the moment and stay in the game and just keep going and playing defense."

With the No. 3 team in the AP poll on the Rupp floor, Kentucky missed a chance to earn its first top-25 RPI victory and third against the top 50 and fell to 19-6, 9-3.

Primarily employing the switching man-to-man defense that has been their staple this season, the Wildcats forced Florida to miss 25 of its first 40 shots from the field and all but one of its first 11 3-point attempts. They were defending like a team in the mood to dominate a great team and electrify their home fans.

One problem with that: You can’t dominate if you don’t have the ball.

The Wildcats were turning the ball over at a rate of more than one every 2½ minutes, and Florida was feasting on those turnovers that were of the live-ball variety. Nearly all of the baskets the Gators did make were directly at the rim. Without the transition game early in the game, there’d have been almost no Florida offense at all. Down the stretch, it was not turnovers so much as all the offensive rebounds surrendered by Kentucky that empowered the Gators.

The Wildcats eventually took enough advantage of their early defensive excellence to build a 45-38 at lead with 11:38 left, with point guard Andrew Harrison following a missed fastbreak layup by star forward Julius Randle. But the D dissolved as the Gators began to emphasize their best options.

Young worked inside for two points and a foul, then Wilbekin shook a defender and stepped back into a 3, and finally Young rolled past UK’s slumping Willie Cauley-Stein for a Jabbar-style sky-hook and a foul to make it a 3-point play. In just 3 minutes, Florida had gone from a dangerous deficit into the lead.

Randle got fouled inside and made a couple of free throws to take it back, but somehow the Kentucky bench—presumably coach John Calipari—was tagged with a technical foul after the second free throw landed. It was odd timing, to say the least, and Florida took great advantage. Wilbekin made both free throws to put the Gators back in front, and then Prather scored on a floater to stretch the lead to three points. Calipari acknowledged the technical "could've" been what turned around the game for Florida. He did not say what his comment was to the game official but said he was speaking softly.

"I didn't know what was going on," Young said, according to Brett Dawson of Cats' Pause. "Thank you. Thank you for the two free points."

When the game was on the line, the Wildcats could not handle Wilbekin whether it was a guard still in charge of defending him or when he was switched onto a big man. He made six consecutive free throws in the space of four Gators possessions.

"Most of the tapes that I watched they were in tight games, he got himself fouled," Calipari said.

"What they did, they've done, I'm guessing 10 games this year, where, with five minutes to go, four minutes to go, three minutes to go, it's anybody's ballgame. Then they just grinded better than the other team grinds it, like they did us. They were just a little too experienced for us down the stretch."